Turnitin Lawsuit to Be Dismissed–AV v. iParadigms

iParadigms, the operators of the Turnitin plagiarism detection tool, issued a confusing press release earlier this week announcing that the lawsuit against them was going to be dismissed. To make sense of the press release, I pulled the applicable court filing–see it here. The main operative provision says:

“It appearing to the Court that Plaintiffs’ Motion for Summary Judgment should be granted as to the counterclaims and Defendant’s Motion for Summary Judgment should be granted as to the Complaint, it is hereby ORDERED that the this [sic] case is removed from the Court’s trial docket, and a Memorandum Opinion and Order will be forthcoming.”

It is unusual for a judge to foreshadow an opinion like this. I’m guessing the judge was trying to schedule another trial and needed the space, so the judge issued this order before he had time to write up his thoughts. As of this morning, the opinion still hadn’t been posted to PACER. I’m not sure why iParadigms waited a month to issue this press release but then decided to release it now prior to the actual opinion. In any case, I’m sure the opinion will be an interesting read on the contract or copyright topics (or both), but we’ll have to wait to see the judge’s thinking.